NAC Smart Tag Turns Microsoft Office into Layman’s GIS

NAC Geographic Products Inc. (Canada) has released the NAC Smart Tag DLL for Microsoft Office - an integration of the Natural Area Coding System with Microsoft Smart Tag technology.

Smart tags enable real-time, dynamic recognition of content and offer relevant options to people as they work to allow them to quickly access and analyse information. Microsoft has already included the smart tags for Financial Symbol, Address, Place, Date, Telephone Number, Time and Personal Name in its Office suite including Outlook email software.
Although Address and Place smart tags can correctly recognise most US addresses, they are not able to handle international addresses, not mention addresses in other languages and characters or locations without addresses.

Therefore, a smart tag for any area or any location in the world is urgently demanded. NAC Smart Tag is exactly such a tag based on a Natural Area Code (NAC) which always starts with "NAC: " followed by two character strings separated by one blank space. NAC is highly efficient which can specify an area about 1,000km X 670km anywhere in the world with two characters, 35km X 23km with four characters, a square kilometre (1,200m X 750m) with six characters, a building size area (40m X 25m) with eight characters and a square meter (1.3m X 0.8m) with ten characters. It is also language independent and covers all locations and areas in the world.

NAC Smart Tags in Office documents can be saved with the contents in web pages which can be directly published on the Internet to significantly reduce the work of referencing accurate locations for location sensitive stories. Search engines can even use the NACs to sort stories according to their locations.

If you have a NAC enhanced GPS receiver (GPS cepphones, GPS watches, GPS cameras, etc) such as Locamagic, you can click a button to get the NAC of your current location instantly. If you don't have such a device, you can also get it on NAC Lookup Service or NAC Enhanced Google Maps.

Source: NAC Geographic Products